Holocaust Remembrance Day “For Victory and Renewal! Day of Polish Jewry”

Today we commemorate Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day. We honor the memory of six million lives lost, and the enduring resilience of Jewish communities across Europe.

“To Victory and Rebirth!”
These words appear on a striking poster created by Moshe Vorobeichic in 1941 — one of the earliest public commemorations in Mandatory Palestine of the destruction of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust. Designed for “Polish Jewry Day,” a special memorial marked in the Yishuv in Elul 5701 (September 1941), just two years after the outbreak of WWII, the poster depicts a burning Jewish town, fleeing refugees, and a rising sun — a powerful image of devastation intertwined with hope.

The 1940s in Mandatory Palestine were a time of fear, uncertainty, and a fierce struggle for identity and future statehood. News of the atrocities in Europe reached the Yishuv slowly, but each scrap of information — including visual messages like this — became a tool of mourning, resistance, and moral urgency.

Moshe Vorobeichic, a Belarus-born photographer and graphic designer — also known as Moi Ver, Moshé Raviv, or Moses Vorobeichi — was among the most distinctive visual artists of his time. His photography and design style helped shape the early visual language of the Zionist movement and gave voice to both trauma and hope. Extremely rare today, this poster is considered a historic, artistic, and cultural artifact of immense value. Very few copies survived. It is a living witness to the moment the Yishuv began not only to hear, but also to remember.

September 1st, the day World War II began, became a symbolic marker for the collapse of Polish Jewry and the onset of the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history.
This poster was once a cry of anguish. Today, it is a cry of memory — a graphic cry from the past, still echoing in our present.